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Comment by flavius29663 | Hacker News Reader

I have a different idea other than banning: make companies pay a tax on each bit of user information they hold.

Great idea! It means that the company gets to do the tracking as much as it wants as long as it shares some of these profits with the government, and as a bonus gets to enjoy a reasonably confidence that any initiative to futher enhance privacy will be quashed in a hurry - with bipartisan support, too, especially in the current tax revenue slump thanks to the ongoing pandemic. /s

The word you were probably looking for is fines, but they would have to be punitive and extraordinarily risky to stop the practice...

what I meant was taxes high enough to matter for the bottom line. Also, this would force the companies to open up their databases for government or public inspection, kind-of like we do today with uranium processing. This alone would expose dark behavior much earlier than today

Tax, how about royalties to the user. They use that data to advertise to other users within a family or circle. It’s data about us, why shouldn’t they have to pay a royalty to users and get our permissions beforehand when they want to utilize the data in different ways.

We have different licenses for code and projects. Why not have something similar for user data / metadata

You could argue that they do pay a royalty to users, and that royalty gets put toward free access to software and services. Whether or not that royalty is sufficient is fine to debate, but at the end of the day someone is footing the bill.

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